A little more progress on Gamaliel’s Chapter 3 of TTWC1 and a little dialog for his Chapter 5 as well. It’s a little ironic, but the Army of Light’s campaign in the south is arguably the more dynamic when compared to that of the main force in the north. A good chunk of it doesn’t even get conveyed until the second book. Perhaps that will convince people to stick with the Archbishop and not skip over to Xenomachos’ section. Who knows?

I made a little progress on Gamaliel’s Chapter 3 in TTWC1. I’m a little worried about how readers will take his section, though. It’s one thing to have a brief stopover in an unlikable character’s POV, but this is going to be seven chapters straight of this guy. That’s going to be over three months in the serial run. I suppose my job is to keep him interesting. We’ll see how I fare at that. Stay tuned.

I did a little bit of work on TBP, making some addition to the map, axing a few extraneous characters, etc. I’d be quite content to keep on playing with the story, but my lead time isn’t going to hold out forever and at the rate I’ve been going, I’m going to stall out before too long on TTWC1 unless I get to working on it. If I can at least get one of Gamaliel’s chapters finished before the week’s out, I’ll be doing good. If I can go farther than that, even better. Stay tuned.

I made a little progress on TBP. It was a nice bit of serendipity writing this one scene where two characters were clashing and I just couldn’t see a middle way between them, so I had to insert another character to play the mediator and I thought, “I guess I need to actually come up with a new character to take this role.” Then I thought a bit and realized, “Hey, I already have a character who would act like this and it would totally further his agenda.” One of my big challenges in replotting this story is trying to fit in all the charas and give them sufficient screentime and this was certainly helping toward that end.

Ultimately, I’m probably going to be cutting back the cast. You see, TBP was one of the stories I originally envisioned back in high school and at that time I added characters to the cast based more off of “This sounds like a cool idea” rather than critically thinking about function in the context of the story. When I rework my old ideas like this, I try to preserve as much of the original vision as possible, but also I don’t hesitate to make major changes if it means a better story. It’s a challenge, but that’s part of it. Stay tuned for more.

Well, it’s taken long enough, but I think I finally have the outline of TBP in a serviceable condition. It should be enough to go forward, even if full production won’t start until after TTWC3 is done. I might as well finish out the week in TBP and then start working on TTWC1. Stay tuned.

More futzing around with TBP. I really more time than I usually have to really sort through all the threads, but so it goes. Adding in little scraps of dialog here and there have to count for something. Stay tuned.

What little time I had to write yesterday was spent working on dialog for a scene in TBP. I know I was supposed to be focusing on just sorting out the general outline, but I felt like working on a scene. I may well end up spending the week on TBP. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

I decided to poke around a bit with The Brothers Pendragon and realized I haven’t updated my outline since the rough sketch I made over ten years ago, My vision for the story’s changed considerably since then, so I’ve made it my pet project at the moment to get things sorted out.

I also did a little fiddling around with the few scenes I have already written. On in particular has artifacts from the days before I was as strict as I am about POV, so I made some adjustments there. I’ll probably be jotting down some dialog and such while I sort out the overall chronology of events, which is likely to only whet my appetite to write more on the story rather than sate it. Stay tuned.

This report is a little late, but I made more progress on Chapter 3 of Tico4, grinding to a halt on a particularly tricky section, then mostly finished Chapters 6 and 7 and did little bits of dialog in a few other places. I believe I’ll be switching back over to TTWC1 this week, so I can give the Tico folks a rest and gather my thoughts in preparation for the next push. Stay tuned.

I made a little more progress on Chapter 3 of Tico4. You know how some authors talk about the characters writing themselves? Well, it happens to me sometimes and usually the story benefits from it, but occasionally they threaten to derail the plot. Maybe I’ll discuss this in greater depth once the chapter gets posted. My weekend is fairly open, so I hope to make some good progress over the next couple days. Stay tuned.